Bad Bunny’s highly anticipated halftime performance at Super Bowl LX was epic, joyful, beautiful, captivating, exciting and delightfully entertaining. It was a big night for Puerto Ricans, Latinos, immigrants and all Americans. It is easily one of the best halftime performances ever. The 13-minute experience is a phenomenal, complex culture capture that is worth teaching in college classrooms. Fortunately, students and their instructors can easily access it on the NFL’s YouTube channel. Unsurprisingly, as of Tuesday evening it has been watched more than 62 million times.
U.S. president Donald Trump did not love Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio’s show as much as millions of others and I did. In fact, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the show was “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!” Months before the performance even occurred, the NFL’s choice to put one of the world’s biggest musical icons on television’s biggest stage garnered critique from conservatives. They were upset when the six-time Grammy winner, a U.S. citizen, announced that all the songs were going to be in Spanish. “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying,” Trump wrongly proclaimed in his social media post just after the halftime extravaganza ended.
According to U.S. Census data, Spanish is spoken in well over 41 million households in this country, which is the highest number in the world after Mexico. Some estimates predict that one in three Americans will be Spanish speakers by 2050. Furthermore, the International Center for Language Studies reports that Spanish is spoken by 560 million people globally and that it is the official or national language in 21 countries. If the NFL’s goal was to attract more viewers across and beyond the U.S., then allowing a global megastar to perform entirely in Spanish was a brilliant business decision. Despite this, critics firmly maintain that the Super Bowl is an American cultural product.
“A slap in the face to our country” is how Trump characterized Benito Bowl. Perhaps for some, but definitely not for the Latinos who watched the halftime show at Barrio BX, a restaurant in the Bronx. A CNN broadcast there showed an electrifying gathering of excited Americans, most of them Puerto Rican. “Many said this was the greatest display of Puerto Rican and Latino pride they had ever seen on such a big global stage,” Maria Santana, the CNN reporter, noted. Other networks have been showing huge crowds of Latinos gathered all across the U.S. clearly enjoying the performance. It was the antithesis of a slap in the face to these Americans. I, too, am American. I did not feel like my country had been disrespectfully slapped.
I have vacationed in Puerto Rico more than anywhere else. It is my happy place. I came out to my best friend during our 2005 vacation there. It was the first trip I went on in 2008 with the boyfriend to whom I am now happily married. The day after I earned tenure at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011, I went there for several days to rest, recover and celebrate; it was my husband’s tenure gift to me. Two of my former students married each other there; of course I attended. For more than 20 years, I have felt connected to the place and its people.
I was there in 2006 when Miss Puerto Rico Zuleyka Rivera won Miss Universe. There was a parade to welcome her home. It was lit. The cultural pride was unlike anything I had experienced. Bad Bunny’s performance was reminiscent of that. It also reminded me of the loving Puerto Rican families I have met, the amazingly delicious meals I have eaten, the nightclubs and streets in which I have danced, and photos I have taken with stunning cultural scenes surrounding me. In lots of ways, I had experienced Bad Bunny’s halftime show many times before—in real life.
Corporations often make ads and other content that miss the mark on reflecting diverse cultures and communities. Some are simply inaccurate, while others are stereotypical and offensive (for example, a pair of Heinz ads released in 2024). Many times, the creators of those ads are college graduates. Professors who teach marketing and advertising classes could use Bad Bunny’s halftime performance as a case example on how to reflect culture with complexity and authenticity. It could also be useful in photography, journalism, filmmaking and other content-creation courses. It is a masterclass in multidimensionality—showcasing numerous sides of people and places instead of defaulting to one-sided, racist tropes. Dissecting the video frame by frame would be quite instructive; so too would analyses of still photos from the show.
Bad Bunny took viewers on a thrilling field trip through Puerto Rico. Faculty members could thoughtfully do versions of the same. A quick trip to someplace, whether it is across town or far away, will not be deep enough. In fact, doing so could result in problematic misinterpretations. Regardless of duration, cultural excursions must be accompanied by meaningful assignments that require deep research into the place and its history, sampling its food, listening to its music, visiting its schools, exploring its fashions, understanding its government, stopping by a range of its businesses and, most importantly, conducting intergenerational interviews with its residents.
Undoubtedly, Benito got it so right because the culture he was reflecting is his own. As an assignment, professors could ask students to sketch, fully design or even produce digital content that deeply reflects their own cultures and the places they are from. Bad Bunny set an impressively high bar. But what he did at Levi’s Stadium during Super Bowl LX could offer much guidance to students who aspire to get culture right in their future careers.
Shaun Harper is University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. His most recent book is titled Let’s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America’s Most Polarizing Topics.
